acronyms and character entity set codes

aloha, y'all!

a recent exchange on the AU WG list -- which begins at: (long URL warning!)
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-au/1999JulSep/0100.html>
reminded me, that, a few months ago, whilst working under a tight deadline, i
found myself searching the W3C's MarkUp web space...  in the course of
listening to the MarkUp activity's main page, i heard the announcement for what
was then the brand new reformulation of strict HTML4 into XML -- XHTML (TM),
but since the trademark symbol was superscripted, part of a hyperlink, and
there was no white space between the TM and the XHTML, what i  heard was that
the W3C was promulgating something named X H T M L T M -- which confused the
hell out of me, for whilst i instantly identified meaning of the X the H the T
the initial M and the L, i could not, for the life of me, figure out what in
the world the extra T and M stood for, until i took a listen to the document
source and discovered that what i took for part of the ML's acronym was
actually a trademark symbol (as defined by the character entity &#8482;)... 
needless to say, i wasted a good deal of time trying to figure out something
which could have easily been made self-evident, had the trademark been
encapsulated in an ACRONYM with the TITLE "trademark"

which brings me to wonder--can one use ABBR and ACRONYM on character entity set
codes?  i don't "see" why not -- after all, a character entity code is just a
bit of text -- but can't find anything that says whether or not it's kosher...

gregory
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He that lives on Hope, dies farting
     -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1763
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Gregory J. Rosmaita <oedipus@hicom.net>
   President, WebMaster, & Minister of Propaganda, 
        VICUG NYC <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/vicug/>
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Received on Wednesday, 18 August 1999 19:25:44 UTC